We're all familiar with the threat of electronic viruses. But other malicious software can exploit invisible security holes in your network, applications, and even web browsers. Learn how to plug those gaps.

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Introduction

The less-than-humorous aphorism of the IT industry is that the final user is
the beta test site. Unfortunately, that has been very trueand still
is.

Some vendors have been less than diligent when coding their products, and
correct the problems after the fact. Once bugs in their code are foundmost
often by usersmanufacturers and vendors then create an advisory and
provide patches for the found bugs. Most times, these code flaws are merely
inconveniences to users. But sometimes they're far worse, allowing an
unauthorized person to execute arbitrary code to gain access to a system or
damage it using a code flaw known as a buffer overrun or buffer
overflow. (Among the hacking community it's called smashing the
stack.)